


the clock will never rewind

by peripherally



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, POV Character of Color, Upton House (The Magnus Archives), let's think about that for a hot sec, so like. what would it do to your ability to connect with others, spoilers for MAG 194, to get snatched up by the god of Not Having Choices during your formative years?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29388738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peripherally/pseuds/peripherally
Summary: The problem is: Annabelle doesn’t know if she likes Mikaele or not.
Relationships: Annabelle Cane & Mikaele Salesa
Comments: 17
Kudos: 47





	the clock will never rewind

The problem is: Annabelle doesn’t know if she likes Mikaele or not.

It’s been a very long time since she’s interacted with…  _ anyone, _ really. Anyone who she wasn’t manipulating, that is. Over the years, she’s tried various methods of keeping the amount of string-pulling she needs to do in her day-to-day life to an absolute minimum - wearing beanies and oversized hoodies, styling her hair in different ways, and so on - but, well. It’s just not very easy to connect with anyone when you’re constantly having to reach into their mind to redirect their attention away from the massive hole in the side of your skull.

It’s felt surprisingly freeing, not having to do any of that in Mikaele’s house. Freeing enough to make her uneasy. It takes her back to times she’d thought she left far behind her; that first rush of freedom when she arrived at university, all her grand hopes of being able to escape, to live, to reinvent herself. 

Well, she certainly had reinvented herself, in the end.

Annabelle had made few friends, in that brief time she’d spent at uni. She never became close enough with any of them to feel comfortable enough not to put up an act, not to pick and choose what traits she showed them; to “be herself,” as she’d thought of it back then.

Does she really like him? Or is he simply the first person she’s met in years who’s recognized her for who and what she is and not been paralyzed with fear?

Her conversational skills are almost non-existent. Oh, of course she always knows the  _ right thing to say _ \- the Mother gives her that - but there isn’t really any such thing, with Mikaele. She’s not  _ trying  _ to get anything from him, or to make him think anything in particular, or to get him to do anything for her. In the absence of a concrete goal, that voice at the back of her mind that feeds her lines has remained largely silent.

Without the Mother’s guidance, Annabelle has defaulted to those forms of communication which come most easily to her after all these years: monologuing as if Mikaele were one of her captive audiences, making cryptic remarks, and otherwise staying out of sight. She doesn’t think that this behavior is traditionally considered to be conducive to human bonding, but her housemate has remained warm and hospitable towards her nonetheless. He has never made her feel unwelcome here.

She knows, of course, that he’s scared in his own way. Mikaele Salesa is not a stupid man. He can see the threat she represents to his sanctum, the potential that one day he may go to bed in an oasis and wake up at the center of a freshly-sprouted personalized hell.

And yet, he does not seem to be scared of  _ her. _

Does she like Mikaele, or is she just lonely?

It has been two days in the oasis since Martin and Jonathan left. Very soon, Annabelle will need to begin following them. By all rights, she should have left already.

She had not arrived at the house carrying anything with her. A few days after settling in, she’d found a small leather shoulder bag, tucked away in a corner of the attic. She had taken it back to her bedroom and hidden it at the back of the closet, in anticipation of her future need to carry the camera across endless miles of fear-stricken wasteland.

Now, she opens her closet, kneels on the floor, and pulls it out. It is visibly weathered, the leather darkened and stained and the buckle tarnished. A nice vintage piece. She rubs her thumb across the clasp. It looks like something she might have chosen for herself, back in the days when she still did that sort of thing.

She stands up and slings the bag across her shoulders. As she is making her way downstairs, she glances out a window, and pauses.

Instead of proceeding to the sitting room to inform Mikaele of her impending departure, she heads for the front door and steps out into the afternoon sunlight. She strolls across the lawn and down into the garden. It was October when the Change rolled across the world; realistically, the plant life here should not be this lush and colourful, nor the sun this warm. She brushes her fingers across the petals of the flowers lining the path and contemplates the fear-mechanism of the broken camera - the way it constructs the ideal sanctuary for its owner, all the better to heighten their fearfulness of the outside world.

Mikaele Salesa is apparently the kind of person whose idea of a perfect home includes a garden full of wildflowers and eternal sunny days. She’s not sure what to think about that.

As she heads back inside a while later, her bag full of picked flowers, she stops briefly in the entrance hall to pick up a rectangular vase from a side table. She carries it with her into the front sitting room, not bothering to fill it with water. Mikaele is there, lounging on the settee, drinking.

“Ah,” he says. “Hello there, Annabelle.” He watches her curiously as she sets the vase down, taking a few moments to rotate it so that the corners line up with the design in the center of the coffee table. 

“Been down to the garden, have you? It’s a nice day out.”

It’s always a nice day out, in this oasis. Annabelle gives a noncommittal hum in reply, flipping open the top of the bag and beginning to arrange the flowers in the vase, white and blue and purple and green mingling together. She’s never arranged flowers before. She thinks she enjoys it.

“Thank you,” Mikaele says quietly. Annabelle glances over at him. He is sitting forward, elbows resting on his knees, wineglass dangling in one hand. He is gazing at the flowers. “They are very nice.”

Annabelle flashes him a smile. “Just thought I would brighten up the place a little,” she says. “I’m glad you like them.” And, with dull surprise, she realizes that she is being sincere.

She leaves the room quickly after that, retreating to the bedroom that will soon no longer be hers. She stays there until there is no longer sunlight coming in through the window.

It doesn’t matter whether she likes Mikaele or not.

Late into the night, after Mikaele has fallen asleep, Annabelle enters his bedroom and sinks her fangs into the skin just above his wrist. She watches as his breathing slows, until she knows that the venom has stopped his heart.

He dies asleep and unaware. Peacefully and painlessly. Unafraid. She doesn’t know if this is better or worse than her other plan, the one that would have wrung a bit of Web-fear out of him before the end. Perhaps it would have been more respectful to allow him a conscious end, regardless of the small detail of Annabelle getting a free meal out of it. 

It’s a moot point. He is dead.

As she approaches the border between this place and the next, the weight of the camera sitting solid against her hip, she feels the oasis begin to crumble behind her. The house will be subsumed into the Necropolis, she expects. But that place will not have his body. The body that used to be Mikaele Salesa is encased in web, as is his entire bedroom, and the hallway leading to it; by the time any of the creatures that prowl the City of the Dead manage to reach the center of that tomb, there won’t be enough left of him to toy with. He's earned that.

Annabelle sets out for the Panopticon, and does not look back.

**Author's Note:**

> annabelle: (panicking) i have feelings for mikaele???  
> narrator: the feeling was friendship, but annabelle had never experienced it
> 
> this is the first fic i've written and finished in... four years? long enough for me to have deleted my childhood ao3 account (yeah, yeah, i know) and to finally come trotting back after the last few episodes of the magnus archives made me Big Sad. turns out all i needed to get back into writing after all this time was to get real damn sad about mikaele salesa's death (and to have tons of free time due to being stuck in quarantine by myself).
> 
> this characterization of annabelle may or may not get jossed within the next few episodes; although i have my own theories about the web's endgame, i tried to keep annabelle's tma-plot-related goals and motives as vague as possible, to give this fic a better chance of standing the test of time. regardless, i think she's an extremely sympathetic character, i wish she weren't reduced in so many fics to a one-dimensional Strong Female Plot Device, and i hope i did her justice here.
> 
> title is from "Dance or Die" by Janelle Monáe. please feel free to leave a comment with thoughts, feedback, or crit!


End file.
